Winning a Contested Throne
Kublai was born in 1215, a grandson of Genghis, and grew up in a family where succession was decided by force as often as by council. He was given territory in north China and, unusually for a Mongol prince, surrounded himself with Chinese advisers, studying methods of taxation and administration rather than treating the region purely as a source of plunder. He commanded campaigns in the southwest against the kingdom of Dali and learned the logistics of war in terrain where cavalry alone could not win.
When his brother the great khan Mongke died in 1259, Kublai broke off campaigning and had himself proclaimed by his own supporters in China, while his younger brother Ariq Boke was elected by a more traditional assembly in Mongolia. The civil war lasted four years. Kublai won largely because he controlled the agricultural surplus of north China and could starve the steppe of grain. The victory was decisive and costly: the western khanates never fully accepted him, and the unified Mongol empire effectively ended.
Ruling China as a Foreigner
He declared a Chinese-style dynasty, the Yuan, in 1271, built a new capital at Dadu on the site of modern Beijing, and completed the conquest of the Southern Song by 1279, taking the wealthiest and most populous state on earth. Governing it meant reconciling irreconcilables. He kept Mongol military supremacy and a legal hierarchy that ranked Mongols first, Central Asian and other foreigners second, northern Chinese third and southern Chinese last, while depending on Chinese officials and revenue to make the state function.
He suspended the civil service examinations for decades, which shut the Confucian scholar class out of the route to office it regarded as its own and earned him lasting hostility in Chinese historiography. He extended the Grand Canal to feed the new capital, promoted paper currency, patronised Tibetan Buddhism through the lama Phags-pa, who devised a universal script for the empire, and employed foreigners at every level, which is how a Venetian family could plausibly claim years of service at his court.
The Limits of the Possible
The expansion did not stop until it broke. Two invasions of Japan, in 1274 and 1281, ended in disaster when storms wrecked the fleets, the second one enormous; Japanese tradition named those winds kamikaze. Campaigns into Vietnam, Champa, Burma and Java produced nominal submissions and heavy losses in terrain and climate hostile to steppe warfare. The costs fell on the Chinese tax base, and the finance ministers who raised the money, notably Ahmad Fanakati, became objects of hatred and, in his case, assassination.
Marco Polo's account made Kublai a legend in Europe, and it must be read carefully; the book was dictated to a romance writer in a Genoese prison, contains obvious errors and omissions, and its accuracy has been debated for centuries, though most specialists accept that Polo travelled and saw a good deal of what he describes. Kublai died in 1294, having outlived his favourite wife Chabi and his chosen heir, and reportedly grown heavy and gout-ridden. The Yuan dynasty lasted less than eighty years after him.
